A year on from launch, TextMaster, the crowdsourced platform for content translation, copywriting, and proofreading, has raised its first funding round: €1.64 million from the French VC fund, Alven Capital, and business angels, including Fabrice Grinda (Founder of Aucland.fr and co-founder of OLX Inc.) and Geoffroy Bragadir (Founder of Empruntis). The Brussels-headquartered company says it will use the new capital to “accelerate” growth as it expands internationally, including opening an office in New York.

TextMaster offers a platform for content creators to crowdsource their copywriting, translation and proofreading needs via its community of ‘professionals’ who have each gone through a quality vetting process and are paid per word. We’ve previously described the service as a bit like Mechanical Turk but for a very specific niche.

TextMaster claims that 4,000 clients have used the service in its 12 months of operation, including AlloCiné, Cityrama, and Zagat, while its ‘crowd’ has grown to 35,000 copy editors, writers and translators who have processed “more than 12.5 million words.” Refreshingly, the startup has been international more or less from the get go. TextMaster is available in eight languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Chinese.

It’s also gunning to be a platform in the true sense of the word. Back in July, TextMaster rolled out a public API so that app developers could build copywriting, translation and proofreading functionality into their wares.